Chemistry among RSOs at FOTA’s Art Lab

The Fall Fair will feature interactive demonstrations from 11 arts RSOs and is free to students.

For students only familiar with the materials and procedures of chemistry labs, this lab is quite different.
Festival of the Arts (FOTA) will host its Fall Fair: Art Lab from 5–8 p.m. on Saturday in the Reynolds Club. The event will feature interactive demonstrations from 11 arts RSOs and is free to students.

The RSOs involved include dance groups like Argentine Tango Club, Rhythmic Bodies in Motion, and PhiNix Dance Crew, as well as Le Vorris and Vox, Culinary Club, and Fire Escape Films. Two photographers and a filmmaker will also participate. The Classical Entertainment Society will provide props for students to choose from in order to pose and create their own portrait with Glass Eyeball, a photography RSO.

Le Vorris & Vox will perform acrobatic work and teach juggling, hula hooping, and mask painting. While movement-based RSOs like Le Vorris & Vox have not usually been involved with FOTA in the past, fourth-year FOTA Programming Director Eugenia Briceno said they are a positive addition.

“Things like Circus are something creative in a new way than FOTA usually does, so we’re looking forward to having them there,” Briceno said.

Argentine Tango Club will be holding small workshops to teach the basics of the dance, including how to make contact and follow along, in addition to teaching more about tango music. Second-year Angela Wang, a member of both Argentine Tango Club and Le Vorris and Vox, said that though everything Le Vorris and Vox does is teaching- and learning-based, Saturday’s activity will be a departure from the Argentine Tango Club’s typical work.

The event is all about participation and learning. “It is not just a showcase; the groups will be showing how to do their art,” fourth-year FOTA Executive Director Shola Farber said. “I want people to walk in who’ve never done [these activities] before or never had a chance to do them, and try multiple things. Maybe they’ll participate in the activity in the future.”
Farber said she hopes the activities engage students of varying artistic abilities.

“[The event] is useful for people who haven’t tried arts in a while or haven’t had the time and want to try it at a low scale,” Farber said.

The involvement of many RSOs in the Fall Fair came about because of the Student Government (SG) Arts roundtable discussion held earlier this quarter. Wang, who is also a member of SG, said that SG had decided to hold the roundtable because they had realized that, while RSOs function well independently, they don’t collaborate much. “We wanted to bring RSOs together to hold bigger events, possibly fewer, bigger events,” Wang said. “So we brought all the arts people together to see if they could put some things together.”

According to Farber, this increase in collaboration among arts RSOs comes at the perfect time on campus. “It is a really great year for the arts on campus because of the Logan Center opening and the dance groups forming a council. That interaction between groups is starting to take place.”

Though the Fall Fair is new this year, Briceno said FOTA is hoping to make it a new fall quarter tradition, as it seems to fit well with FOTA’s core principles.

“We want to facilitate student work and create an atmosphere of art for people participating in the arts in varying scope,” Farber said. “[Through the fair] we’re trying to be really open and interactive and allow people to try new things.”